Sustainable Identity and Access Management

For today's enterprises, information technology (IT) evolved into a key success factor affecting nearly all areas of value chains. As a consequence, identity and access management (IAM) is established for centralized and structured management of digital identities together with their access to internal assets. During this effort, a centralized management platform is created, which serves as middle-ware among available software systems and human resource applications, thereby creating a unified view and enabling business-oriented management. This enables the implementation of an according level of IT-security, business process automation and the alignment to external compliance requirements. However, as IT-infrastructures evolve over time, thereby leading to continuous changes and varying demands, these developments need to be addressed within IAM in a constant manner. As IAM is designed as a cross-cutting topic between business and IT , business requirements such as restructurings need to be realized likewise. Additionally, more and more legal requirements are set in place by external authorities which affect the way digital information are to be managed. Bringing together requirements of these different stakeholders in a comprehensive way imposes high complexity for enterprises, thereby leading to high administrational effort. This leads to a situation where enterprises are in need to constantly evaluate and adapt their implemented IAM strategy and execution. Thus the dissertation at hand is devoted to provide means of aligning IAM to a more sustainable way of operation. Within information systems research, sustainability comprises the ability to meet the needs of today without hindering future developments. To achieve this, the two concepts IAM measurement and IAM policies are leveraged. Firstly, IAM measurement enables enterprises to achieve detailed information concerning the state of an IAM infrastructure. Secondly, this effort is fostered to shift IAM to a more dynamic way of operation and provide suitable recommendations concerning how to adjust different aspects of IAM in a long-term manner. During the research process, the presented approaches have been evaluated within real-world scenarios to outline their relevance and demonstrate practical applicability